You’re a user experience designer so doesn’t it make sense to apply the principles of the UX design process to your next job interview? Onward Search examines the user experience of the UX job interview with recommendations to help you ace your next interview including:

• Researching the Hiring Company’s Environment, Characteristics, and Motivations
• Performing a Mock Contextual Inquiry
• Designing a User Flow for the Interview
• Implementing your Interview Design
• Summerizing and Reporting the Results

Link: UX of a Job Interview

Sarah G. Mitchell, a User Experience and Interaction Designer based in Los Angeles, wrote about what she learned from her UX interviews with companies over the course of a few months including how she presented her past work and finding a good match.

Some of the highlights:

• Connections are great but not everything.
• You shouldn’t count on having internet access during your interview.
• You should always offer a copy of your resume.
• An online portfolio of shiny designs and documents is good to get you in the door, but not that great after that.

If you need some helpful tips & pointers, check out her blog post.

Have you ever had an interview over Skype? It appears to be a growing trend, according to a Times article from a few years ago. Not only does it help companies save time and money interviewing potential candidates, but it still allows the interviewer to see facial expressions and body language. Being in the user experience field, it becomes critically important that if you are presented with this type of interview, that you prepare and go through test runs beforehand, especially if you need to share a file or screen to present some of your projects.

Glassdoor.com gives an inside look at jobs and companies and makes for a good source of information when you want to get an idea of how former and current employees feel about the company. Another great resource is you can get an idea of the process, types of questions and tasks you might be asked about in an interview. For example, check out the feedback from user experience interviews for Microsoft and Amazon. Glassdoor is free for a month or you can post anonymous information about a company you work or worked for and get unlimited access.

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Senior level User Experience Practitioners give advice on how to develop your career and make a major impact in your organization.

You see a great opportunity and send off your resume in hopes of an interview but hear nothing. The problem may not be your years of experience or skill set but that your resume didn’t stand out. Potential employers see tons of bland, generic resumes on a daily basis. As a User Experience Designer, that doesn’t seem like such a great experience.

Interaction designer Abi Jones solved this problem by supplementing her resume with some creativity, creating a visual resume slideshow. They say pictures are worth a thousand words. Now add 20-30 pictures and you are able to tell a story that a typical boring resume or LinkedIn profile can not.

Check out her visual resume to get inspired and add some creativity to your resume.

Google’s job description calls for User Experience Designers that are critical thinkers with a good design sense, a strong technical background, and an eye for making things better. While these traits are certainly important, there are three main characteristics all UX designers should have to be successful in their profession.

Curiosity
A user experience designer is always curious about how things work and why they work this way. They are fascinated with human behavior – how people think and act in different situations. With curiosity comes questions and with those questions come answers through observation, research, and testing. Don Norman once said:

“I question my own ideas and that’s the only way to make progress, always curious, always questioning.”

Empathy
A user experience designer advocates for the user. To do that, they have to be able to put themselves into another’s shoe – understanding their emotions and feelings. To truly design for the end user, one must understand the struggles and pain they go through when interacting with a particular system.

Passion
A UX designer’s job doesn’t just go from 9 to 5. They live and breath it in everything they interact with. When they buy a movie ticket through a touch screen kiosk, use the latest iPhone, or try out a new feature for their favorite website, they are thinking about ways that the experience could be improved or ways to connect people to one another. They not only have a passion for innovation and technology but also in creating passionate users. People with passion look for ways to make things happen.

Having a traditional design or technical background is helpful but to succeed, a good user experience designer must possess curiosity, empathy, and passion.

Zappos is known to be a quirky, fun company culture that is very customer focused so it comes as no surprise that they have awesome descriptions for their user experience jobs.

• You’re a master at turning ideas into solid UX deliverables. Whether the initial concepts come to you as a detailed 40 page document or scribbled on the back of a napkin you know what steps to take to turn them into exceptional experiences.
• You know there’s no “I” in “TEAM” but there is in “Innovation.” You have a team oriented, collaborative approach to user experience design.
• You’re able to communicate ideas and concepts clearly and concisely. You know collaboration is key but design by committee run amok can be the death of a good UX design.
• You are more flexible than an Olympic gymnast and able to shift gears faster than this years’ Daytona 500 winner. You know that being part of an innovative culture means rapid and constantly shifting priorities. You live for the challenge of it.
• Your real-world experience has taught you that “best practices” can be a dirty word. You understand usability best practice rules inside and out – so that you know when it’s appropriate to break them. You’re interested in blazing new trails and establishing new practices that work specifically for our unique environment.
• You celebrate failure. You know that failure is critical to innovation and you learn more from your mistakes than you do from your successes.
• You are able to interpret needs, objectives, and direction from multiple sources of input (you speak both “geek” and “marketing-ese” fluently).
• You are so into online shopping and ecommerce that you have completely forgotten where your local shopping mall is.
• You believe that Jared Spool would easily win a UX celebrity grudge-match with Jakob Nielsen — figuratively speaking, of course! We don’t advocate violence of any kind, but wouldn’t that make for an interesting session at next year’s Information Architecture Summit?
• You are excited by the idea of working in a small and weird team known for their off-base humor and on-target mission to make User Experience a company mindset.

Each year, the IA Institute releases the results from their IA Institute Salary and Benefits Survey.

Some highlights of the 2010 survey include:

• The highest median salary range was a tie between the USD$80,000-90,000 and USD$90,000-100,000 ranges
• Using midpoints, the average salary was estimated to be USD$95,252, up $5,252 from 2009
• Excluding outliers, the average freelance rate was USD$88.65, up USD$3.65 over 2009. The median rate was USD$85.00 and the modal rate was USD$100.00
• The inferred average salary for females was USD$90,513, lower than males’ salaries (USD$100,533)
• Respondents with a Master’s Degree earn 3.5% more than those with Bachelor’s Degrees, a small salary advantage. While the number of respondents holding Doctorate Degrees is very low, figures indicate that they earn nearly 49% more than those with Master’s Degrees and 54.3% more than those holding Bachelor’s Degrees
• The highest response for a Job Title was User Experience Planner/Designer/ Architect (116), followed by Information Architect (54) and Interaction Designer/Architect (39)
• Most respondents (49.6%) identified their position level as “Senior”. Managers made up 11.3% of respondents followed by Juniors and Directors, both at 10.6% and Principals at 5.5%. Freelancers made up 8.4% of respondents
• We have found that 88.5% of respondents perform Wireframing/Sitemaps/Process Flows tasks, while 83.5% perform Interaction Design tasks and 83.1% do some sort of strategic work

You can the full results of the 2010 Salary Survey online or download the PDF